Pegasus Mail v4.52 is an update that
provides support for the new Windows 7 operating system
from Microsoft. All known Windows-7-related issues in v4.51
have been addressed, in particular the annoying problem
where toolbar buttons would sometimes not appear correctly.
As well, the program can now correctly register itself as
a system mailer under Windows 7, meaning that it is now
possible to click mailto: links in web pages and have them
open in Pegasus Mail.

This has actually been a more major update
than we expected, involving a shift between versions of
the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment we now
use that ended up being quite difficult. The development
schedule is now back to normal, though, and work is progressing
on a number of interesting new features in the program,
many of which will be released this year.

Note:
The move to Visual Studio 2008 has resulted in a program
that can no longer be run on Windows 9x systems (Windows
95, Windows 98 or Windows ME). This is not by our design
- it is a Microsoft-enforced limitation of the new compiler.
We are working on finding a way to support Windows 9x systems
for a little longer, but realistically, the days of Windows
9x support are now seriously numbered - it is likely
that there will not be more than one or two more releases
of Pegasus Mail at most that will still support these old
operating systems, and the next major release of the program
almost certainly will not be able to run on anything earlier
than Windows 2000.

International
versions: International language modules
for version 4.51 will work correctly without modification
or update under v4.52.

Pegasus Mail v4.52 is supplied as
both a full installer and as an updater for those of you
who currently use v4.51. If you do currently use
v4.51, we strongly suggest you use the updater instead
of the full installer. Click here to go to the download page, where you
can get v4.52.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
It has been brought to our attention that the Norton Anti-virus
package for Windows may in some situations totally improperly identify
the v4.52 installer as malware and delete the download.
If this happens, disable Norton when downloading and installing
Pegasus Mail. On the basis that Norton/Symantec has done
this for every one of the last three releases
of Pegasus Mail, we can only condemn this product as too
flawed to use, and recommend in the strongest terms
that our users cease using it in favour of alternative,
less buggy anti-virus packages.

June 2009 - Pegasus Mail v4.51 Release

Sometimes, you simply have to bite
the bullet and get going on a task you know is overdue,
but which is scary in its magnitude... Welcome to Pegasus
Mail v4.5!

[ If you don't want to read the story
of this release and the new features it contains, you can
just click here to go to the download page and retrieve
it. ]

I expect many users of Pegasus Mail
v4.4 will look at v4.5 and say "what's the big deal?",
because on the surface, very little appears to have changed
- certainly not enough to suggest that it might have taken
over two years of quite difficult - at times, even harrowing
development. Pegasus Mail has been around for a very, very
long time - the Windows version sent its first messages
in 1992 - and a heritage that long can become a serious
problem over time. In the case of Pegasus Mail, the primary
problem I have had for years has been that it was developed
using an ancient, but wonderfully reliable version of the
Borland C compiler, version 5.02. Unfortunately, Borland
C has been out of development for many years, and by 2006
it was finally becoming clear that its days were very numbered.

The solution was to move the 460,000
line Pegasus Mail codebase to a more modern compiler - in
this case, Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 (and subsequently
Visual Studio 2008). On its own this would have been a big
job, but when the code you're moving is carrying around
as much historical baggage as something like Pegasus Mail,
it gets huge. Of the 460,000 lines of code that make up
Pegasus Mail, more than 100,000 have had to be modified
in some way during the process of modernizing and moving
it to Visual C++, and the testing required has been just
unbelievable. Because there has been such an upheaval in
the underlying code, we briefly considered changing the
version number to 5.0, but decided that a major version
number change should really depend on the significance of
the visible features instead.

On the positive side, the move to a modern
compiler has resulted in the fixing of hundreds of minor
bugs, and creates a platform for future development that
will allow Pegasus Mail to exist as a viable project for
a number of years, so it was definitely worthwhile, even
though it took as much effort as it did. It's not all porting
and bug fixes though - Pegasus Mail v4.5 does have quite
a few worthwhile new capabilities:

Autofiltering
folders Pegasus Mail was the first mail
program to have filtering rules (back in 1990, in fact),
and its filtering capabilities are still the envy of most
mail programs... but they can be time-consuming and fiddly
to use for simple tasks. It occurred to us that what most
people want to do with filters the majority of the time
is simply to file mail they receive from and send to particular
people so it all appears in one place. In v4.5, you can
do this incredibly easily using the new Autofiltering folder
support. Any folder can be made an autofiltering folder
at any time - just right-click it in the folder list and
choose the option there to enable it. When a folder is marked
as autofilteringand you copy or move a message into it,
the program will subsequently move all messages you receive
from that person, and copies of all messages you send to
that person into that folder - it's as easy as that: move
a message into the folder, and Pegasus Mail will do the
rest from that point on. You can turn autofiltering on and
off for folders at any time using the right-click option,
and the program is clever about handling messages you send
to multiple recipients including a person whose address
is a target of an autofiltering folder. We think autofiltering
is a hugely useful feature and hope you like it .

HTML line drawing
The message editor now has a new Draw line button
that allows you to draw horizontal lines in your HTML messages.
When you reply to HTML messages, the same line style is
now also used to separate your text from the text of the
message to which you are replying.

Full justification
available in editor The message editor
now supports full justification of text in your messages.
Choosing full justification will force your message to be
sent as HTML.

Vista-ready
help system The program now has a new help
system which avoids
the bugs introduced by Microsoft in the Windows Vista operating
system.

New reply options
The way the program initiates replies to messages
has been overhauled. If you press <R>, you will get
a normal reply using the reply-options dialog. If you press
<Q>, however, you'll get a "quick reply"
- a reply with no reply options dialog using the last settings
you used. Similarly, pressing <A> will start a "reply-to-all"
without an options dialog using the last settings you used.
Notice also that the reply button now has a down-pointing
arrow at its right-hand side: clicking this arrow will open
a menu allowing you to generate any of these types of reply,
as well as to change the default behaviour of the button
itself.

Signature top-posting
You can now instruct the program to insert your signature
above the text to which you are replying when you generate
replies. This practice is called top posting, and to old-fashioned
people like me it's hideous, but who am I to argue with
a new generation? <Grin>. Enable signature top-posting
in the Messages and replies preferences page.

Spell checker
works on the subject line When you spell-check
a message, the spell checker now also checks the subject
line.

HTML generation
and rendering improved As always, where
HTML is concerned, the never-ending process of "keeping
up with the Joneses" continues in this version of Pegasus
Mail, with better rendering of HTML mail, and considerably
better generation across the board.

Transcript support
Mercury/32, Pegasus Mail's mail server companion product,
can generate what are known as "transcripts" -
reports showing the time and details of the delivery of
a message you send to someone else that can be used as pretty
reliable proof of delivery. Pegasus Mail now has an option
on its message editor's Special page to enable requests
for Mercury transcripts on a message-by-message basis, and
you can specify that the option should be on by default
in the Messages and replies preference page. The option
has no effect and is harmless if you do not use Mercury.

Mailbox maintenance
utility Pegasus Mail now includes a utility
program called MBXMAINT.EXE, which allows both commandline-driven
and interactive maintenance of Pegasus Mail mailboxes from
outside the program. MBXMAINT can be used to move mailboxes,
check and repair folders, and to compress deleted space
from folders. To use MBXMAINT, simply run the EXE file without
any parameters.

Simultaneous
multilingual release V4.51 is being released
simultaneously in versions with full French, German and
Italian interfaces as well as English.

Faster
Long-term users of Pegasus Mail should notice v4.5
being much faster than previous versions due to the use
of more modern software tools.

Click here to go to the downloads page, where you
can retrieve the new version.